Micron Technology Inc, the largest US maker of computer memory chips, is on track for its shares to rise by the most in six months after announcing surprisingly strong sales and profit forecasts, helped by demand for artificial intelligence (AI) products.
Fiscal first-quarter revenue would be about US$8.7 billion, the company said in a statement on Wednesday. That compares with an average analyst estimate of US$8.32 billion. Profit would be about US$1.74 a share, higher than a projection of US$1.52.
The rosy outlook is the latest sign that Micron is benefiting from a boom in AI spending. Orders for high-bandwidth memory have added a lucrative new revenue stream for the company and other chipmakers. The technology helps to develop AI systems by providing more rapid access to massive pools of information.
Photo: Reuters
Demand has been outpacing supply, allowing Micron to boost prices and secure long-term guaranteed contracts. It has already sold out of the product for this year and next year, the company said on Wednesday.
Micron shares rose by about 15 percent to US$110.60 in premarket trading on Thursday. If the gains hold, it would be the biggest intraday increase since March 21.
Results from Micron’s fiscal fourth quarter also handily beat estimates. Revenue increased by 93 percent year-on-year to US$7.75 billion for the period that ended Aug. 29. Excluding certain items, profit was US$1.18 per share. On average, analysts had estimated a profit of US$1.12 per share and revenue of US$7.66 billion.
Micron has an edge because it is the first chipmaker to reliably offer more advanced memory in high volumes, executive vice president of operations Manish Bhatia said in an interview.
With companies racing to beef up their AI software and hardware — and using more memory in the process — Micron is in a good position, he said.
The chipmaker is also emerging from a slowdown in demand for PCs and smartphones, two of the biggest markets for memory chips. Device shipments are now growing again. Those devices would increasingly feature AI functionality that requires more memory chips to work properly, adding a further benefit, Bhatia said.
Micron makes DRAM, a type of chip that temporarily holds information and works alongside processors from companies such as Nvidia Corp and Intel Corp. It also makes nand flash memory — semiconductors that store information in everything ranging from data-center computers to smartphones. The company competes with South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc in the memory market.
“Robust AI demand drove a strong ramp of our data center DRAM products,” Micron chief executive officer Sanjay Mehrotra said in the statement.
“We are entering fiscal 2025 with the best competitive positioning in Micron’s history,” he said.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two
RSS